What We Know (and Don’t) About Those Congressional Budget Plans

I feel I should say something about the Republican House and Senate budget plans, even if a bit late to the pile-on. They are, after all, frameworks for policies that would do grievous harm to people in poverty.

Not up front about this, however. They’re larded with deceptive rhetoric, silent on crucial details and dishonest about revenues. Fortunately, progressive experts have dug into the plans from various angles.

So we know, for example, that the plans purport to balance the budget within 10 years, but wouldn’t. They seem to only because both the House and Senate relied on dynamic scoring models built on the discredited notion that tax cuts will miraculously increase revenues.

That, in and of itself, is a good thing because actually achieving balance so soon would, at the very least, slow our prolonged economic recovery.

What’s not at all a good thing is that the plans move toward balance entirely through spending cuts — about $5.5 trillion in the more radically-right House plan, not much less in the Senate’s.

And defense would not only be held harmless, but actually get a boost, though it’s cleverly designed so as not to affect the budget balance calculation or seem to breach the spending caps set in the 2011 Budget Control Act.

We know the plans would achieve large savings by denying low and moderate-income people the affordable health care they have now. Both would, of course, repeal the Affordable Care Act, including the federal funding that has enabled willing states and the District of Columbia to expand their Medicaid programs.

They would convert what remains of Medicaid into a block grant — or in the case of the Senate, two block grants. The more forthcoming House plan commits to folding the Children’s Health Insurance Program in.

But you won’t find the term “block grant” anywhere in the plans. We’ve instead got the more marketable — and obscure — “State Flexibility Fund” or the equivalent.

Same difference. Though the plans don’t say how the budget would replace the federal matches that now cover more than half states’ Medicaid costs, they do say that savings would total hundreds of billions over the first 10 years — $400 billion in the Senate plan and an even more staggering $913 billion in the House plan.

We also know that the plans would achieve significant additional savings through changes in other mandatory programs, i.e., those that don’t depend on annual appropriations. That’s all we know from the budget figures in the plans.

But the prosy part of the House budget plan reveals that it — like all the plans Congressman Paul Ryan produced while chairing the Budget Committee — would convert SNAP (the food stamp program) to another block grant, a.k.a State Flexibility Fund.

That would cut spending on the program by an estimated $125 billion, beginning in 2021, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports. States would have the flexibility to cope with the funding crunch.

If they made across-the-board benefits cuts, recipients would lose, on average, $55 a month, according to CBPP’s estimates. If they instead made certain categories of recipients ineligible, as many as 12 million people would lose their benefits altogether.

No cuts to Pell grants for low-income college students. But the House plan — again, the more forthcoming — supposedly “makes the program permanently sustainable.” Translated, this means a 10-year freeze on the maximum a student can receive — $5,775 a year.

Don’t suppose I need to say that this is far less than the average costs of attending college. Don’t need to say that these costs can be expected to rise, especially because most states are balancing their budgets in part by hiking tuition.

How the House and Senate Appropriations Committees will divvy up the rest of the savings remains to be seen. Both the House and Senate plans apparently preserve (for real) the cap on non-defense discretionary spending, i.e., for programs whose funding hinges on annual appropriations.

But when we look ahead, we find that these programs would lose many billions more than the caps allow — $759 billion in the House plan and at least $236 billion in the Senate plan.

Put these together with the specified and unspecified cuts in mandatory programs and we come up the trillions cited above because the plans cut only non-defense programs. CBPP figures that more than two-thirds of the money would come from those that serve low-income — and in some cases, moderate-income — people.

Well, these plans aren’t going to result in a final budget that the President will sign. They’re still profoundly worrisome. Because whatever he does sign — and he will sign something — will surely leave key programs for low-income people far short of the funds needed to give them a secure safety net and opportunities to better their financial circumstances.

Even the budget we have now falls short of needs.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2015 at 11:31 am and is filed under Budget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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[…] None of those proposed Social Security benefits cuts, increased Medicare cost-sharing, e.g., through a voucher plan, or tighter limits on Medicaid coverage, which we could expect to see under the Congressional Republicans’ upcoming block grant proposals. […]

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Hi! I'm Kathryn Baer. This blog is one way I use my skills and experience to support policies that will reduce the hardships poor people suffer and the causes of poverty. You can find out more about me here .